I transferred all my files, databases and mail account to my "UNLIMITED" everything account that I ordered at GoDaddy in December 2008. So far so good. Everything seemed okay aside from some latency during peak hours.

I opened a ticket to ask if they could do something about the latency and they promptly answered that they experienced no such thing. As a reply I send them a traceroute from my comp to my website and as a comparison a traceroute from my comp to the GoDaddy homepage. A difference of almost  2 seconds.

As soon as I pressed the send button on the support form they already replied that from their location there was no latency. At least nobody can complain about slow support.

But that was just one thing that turned out to be not so great... It turned out that the UNLIMITED everything package wasn't as unlimited as advertised. You can only create 10 e-mail accounts that do NOT have unlimited space. You have 1000 MB available that you can divide between your e-mail accounts. Now for most people this should do fine, but my local mailbox is now holding around 3 GB that I was planning to mirror online so I could access it via IMAP everywhere I go.

Disillusioned I again went looking for another webhost. In my initial search I also had Site 5 in my list of possible candidates. I looked at their offers once again and it turned out they had some great offer. I had a chat with the online salesperson and asked all the things that I wanted different from GoDaddy and he quickly confirmed that at Site5 there where no hidden agenda's. Unlimited truly is unlimited.

This means that I also had the option to create unlimited domains that are really separated vhosts, another thing I didn't have at GoDaddy where I could only work with domain pointers. This is absolutely fantastic since I have several websites that I could host under one main account and give people that are helping me to maintain some of these sites access to only that specific single website account.

I transferred everything once again to my third webhost in a year, but now I believe that this will be the last host I'll ever need.

It took my quite some time to find a suitable host for my needs. I started my search with the following things I really wanted my new host to offer:

• SSH access (because it just works superfast for maintenance jobs etc.)
• Unlimited space (I reached my limit at my previous host really quick when I uploaded all my raw holiday photos)
• Unlimited bandwidth (Holiday photos waste your bandwidth really quick)
• SSL (off course you can get that anywhere, but I'd rather have my host offering it then a 3th party)
• DNS management (I want to be in charge of my own DNS records)
• Off site DNS (I have some other domains that I would like to manage from one dashboard)
• WebDAV (Need that for my Mozilla Weave account)
• PHP (obviously...)
• MySQL (obviously as well)

At first I only looked at the Dutch market for hosting providers. No particular reason... I quickly figured out that they are incredible pricey in comparison with hosting providers abroad, and that none of them offer unlimited space / bandwidth. For example 'Yourhosting' (one of the top 5 providers in Holland) is offering 2000MB space and 100GB traffic for the price of 85 Euro a month.

I asked around at work if any of my colleagues might know a suitable provider that fitted my needs, and several names came up (all abroad )

• Site5 (a wonderful host, but doesn't offer off site DNS management and doesn't offer MySQL 5 (yet))
• Dreamhost (looked at some user reviews and most of them are negative, plus there own website was down for emergency maintenance when I went to look at the specs)
• GoDaddy (they are 'only' offering 50 MySQL databases, but I think that will make do)

In the end GoDaddy fitted most of my needs and for only $10 a month they can offer me unlimited space / bandwidth / SSH / (off site) DNS and more.

I registered, paid by creditcard, got a free domain which you are looking at right now and everything was just swell.

Then I went over to the domain manager to transfer several of my other domains to them (all .nl) and came to a unpleasant suprise that they apparantly don't register .nl domains, nor transfer them to them.

It's no biggie since I can redirect all the domains to my new server, but it was just a bit unexpected.

Right now I'm doing some stresstests, tracerts, etc to see what the uploadspeed, downloadspeed, ping time etc is. I suspect them from capping my uploadspeed allready, but I'll keep you posted.

At last I took the step to start blogging. You might call it a early new year resolution.

I registered peterruiter.com last week after looking trough numerous hostingspecs at GoDaddy. Unlimited bandwidth and unlimited disk space, YaY!

I'll mock up a few articles about my search for hosting and a little comparison between the different providers.

So far I'm pretty satisfied with what I'm getting at GoDaddy so far.

Also,

I'll try to keep most of the posts in English, but occasionally you might see a lost post in Dutch since that is my native language.

Project Url: http://www.rtvlove.nl

Project delivery: May 02, 2008

Description: RTV LOVE is a local television station in Edam - Volendam. RTV LOVE produces several television shows and has many ours of live radio. When there are no live shows they have an automated system (Scala) that plays texttv. News is fed to Scala from several websites. There are a lot of people that maintain the news so they had to have a multilevel security CMS.

I created the front-end from a PSD and developed the complete back-end system for this website, radio automation information via curl (now playing...) radio streaming, feeding of Scala, javascript menu's and content management system.

Project Url: http://www.sportraadamsterdam.nl

Project delivery: May 07, 2007

Description: Sportraad Amsterdam is a internal organization of the city of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. It advises the city of Amsterdam and corporations in the city of Amsterdam about sport policy and (building) sporting facilities. On this website the sportraad introduces themselves and keeps an archive of all their white-papers.

I created the front-end from a PSD complete with interaction design and developed the complete back-end system for this website with content management system, image gallery with automatic GD scaling of images, flash texts automatically feeded from CMS, sifr  and secure intranet.

Project Url: http://www.heronautobedrijven.nl

Project delivery: Jan 10, 2007

Description: Heron autobedrijven is a Dutch cardealer. On the website they display the latest occasions that are directly linked from a national occasion platform. Heron autobedrijven also shows off their new models of Audi and Volkswagen trough a mootools based image gallery. They also send out several e-mails with personalized news and information about the car people drive. Heron autobedrijven also uses a intranet with several levels of user rights and extensive document management control.

I created the front-end from a PSD complete with interaction design and developed the complete back-end system for this website with content management system, image gallery with automatic GD scaling of images, e-mail marketing module  and secure intranet.

Project Url: http://www.rora.nl

Project delivery: Sep 09, 2006

Description: Rora autobedrijven is a company that sells, leases, rents and finances cars. On this website the visitor can find news about all the brands that Rora deals with, This news is automatically grabbed from all daughter websites. There is also an occasion list of all occasions from all the daughter company's.

I created the front-end from a PSD and developed the complete back-end system for this website with occasion listing, newsgrabbing via curl, flash banners and content management system.

Project Url: http://www.nibjuristen.nl

Project delivery: Jul 10, 2006

Description: NIB juristen a legal counsil company that is part of the NIB Group. With NIB juristen you are assigned a permanent, external corporate lawyer who is thoroughly familiar with your company, without having to hire him as an employee. All the benefits without the downside

I created the front-end from a PSD and developed the complete back-end system for this website with full layering of background divs (all manageable in the CMS) and content management system.